The present invention relates to systems and methods for controlling operation of motor vehicles in accordance with classifying a driver as a primary driver and a secondary driver.
With conventional automotive vehicles, one or more keys are often shared between any number of drivers. For example, the parents of a teenager (or young adult) that is old enough to drive may share the keys for the vehicle with the teenager. The vehicle may be equipped with various safety and/or driver notification features and other vehicle accessories that may be enabled/disabled via a user interface based on the driver's needs. However, in some circumstances, the parent (i.e., primary driver) may not wish to have the various safety and notification related features disabled by the teenager (i.e., secondary driver) or may not wish other accessories that could be potentially distracting such as an audio system to function while the vehicle is driven by the teenager. The parent may configure the safety and notification features or the other accessories prior to allowing the teenager to drive the vehicle, however there is no guarantee that the teenager will not reconfigure them while driving the vehicle.
Commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 7,868,750 discloses a system and method for controlling the operation of vehicle features between primary and secondary drivers based on separately tagged keys for the primary and secondary drivers. The circumstances under which a secondary driver operates the vehicle may include different scenarios with different impacts on the driving behaviors of the secondary driver. Some vehicle accessories such as an audio system may have less impact when the secondary driver drives alone or just with a front seat passenger, whereas playing music may have a greater impact with a fuller vehicle including rear seat passengers. Moreover, prior art systems have not increased the strength of warnings for secondary drivers when rear seat passengers fail to buckle their seat belts or otherwise engage a safety restraint. Since a single set of operating restrictions may not always reflect a best set of restrictions, it would be desirable to tailor restricted operating modes to some of the actual circumstances in which the secondary driver is driving.